[ad_1]
A handful of coins unearthed in a fruit-picking orchard in the U.S. state of Rhode Island and other random corners of New England can help solve a cold, centuries-old affair.
The villain of this story: a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most wanted criminal after he looted a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims to India from Mecca and then escaped capture by posing as a merchant of slaves.
Jim Bailey, amateur historian and metal detector, found the first intact 17th century Arab coin in a meadow in Middletown.
This ancient pocket change – the oldest ever found in North America – could explain how hacker Capt Henry Every went missing.
On September 7, 1695, the pirate ship Fancy, commanded by Every, ambushed and captured the Ganj-i-Sawai, a royal ship owned by the Indian Emperor Aurangzeb, then one of the most powerful men in the world. . On board were not just the faithful returning from their pilgrimage, but tens of millions of dollars in gold and silver.
What followed was one of the most lucrative and heinous thefts of all time. Historical accounts say that Everyone’s group tortured and killed the men aboard the Indian ship and raped the women before fleeing to the Bahamas.
Word of their crimes quickly spread and King William III of England – under enormous pressure from scandalized India and the trading giant of the East India Company – put a big bounty on them. “Everyone was looking for these guys,” Bailey said
Until now, historians only knew that Every finally sailed to Ireland in 1696, where the trail turned cold. But Bailey says the pieces he and others found are proof that the notorious pirate first visited the American Colonies, where he and his crew used the looting for daily expenses during their trips. travel.
The first complete piece surfaced in 2014 at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown, a location that had piqued Bailey’s curiosity two years earlier after finding old colonial pieces, an 18th-century shoe buckle and musket balls .
Waving a metal detector on the ground, he received a signal, dug and found a dark silver coin which he initially assumed was either Spanish or silver minted by the bay colony from Massachusetts. Upon closer inspection, the Arabic text on the coin quickened his pulse.
Research confirmed that the exotic coin was minted in 1693 in Yemen. This raised questions, Bailey said, as there was no evidence that American settlers struggling for a living in the New World traveled anywhere in the Middle East to trade until decades later.
Since then, other detectors have unearthed 15 more Arabic coins from the same era – 10 in Massachusetts, three in Rhode Island and two in Connecticut. Another was found in North Carolina, where records show some of Everyone’s men made it ashore for the first time.
“It appears that some of his crew may have settled in New England and integrated,” said Sarah Sportman, the state archaeologist of Connecticut, where one of the coins was found in 2018 during the excavations in progress on a 17th century agricultural site. “It was almost like a money laundering scheme,” she said.
Although it seems unthinkable now, Every was able to hide in plain sight by posing as a slave trader – an emerging profession in New England in the 1690s. En route to the Bahamas, he set off. even stopped on the French island of Reunion to get black captives to watch the role, Bailey said.
Obscure records show that a ship called Sea Flower, used by pirates after abandoning the Fancy, sailed along the east coast. He arrived with nearly four dozen slaves in 1696 in Newport, Rhode Island, which became a major slave trade hub in North America in the 18th century.
“There is extensive primary source documentation to show that the American colonies were bases of operations for pirates,” said Bailey, 53, a graduate in anthropology from the University of Rhode Island and working as archaeological assistant on the explorations of the pirate ship Wydah Gally. wreck off Cape Cod in the late 1980s.
[ad_2]
Source link